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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

I was invited by the good people at MedCity News to join their weekly MedHeads video chat to talk about Digital Health at CES. It was a great chat about some of the things myself and Stephanie Baum found at CES. Plus, Chris Seper and Neil Versel talked about what they saw watching from home. Check it out in the video embedded below.

Of course, the challenge was we only had 30 minutes to talk about the 2.5 million square feet of of exhibit space and ~20,000 new products that were unveiled at the show. Chew on those numbers a little bit.

Plus, while what’s happening on the show floor is great, there’s also hundreds of thousands of meetings that happen over dinners and drinks and that’s where the most exciting stuff happens. For example, Philips put on an incredible dinner Wednesday night of CES that had a whose who in the Digital Health space. I had a similar experience at the Digital Health Summit Speaker dinner last night. The bringing together of these like minded businesses is a really powerful thing.

You’ll never guess the theme of both dinner events: Collaboration! There was a real sense by those in attendance that we can’t accomplish what we need to alone. We need each other to be successful. The first step to making that happen is meeting each other and learn about what each of us is doing. CES presented an amazing opportunity for doing just that.

Amazingly, there are still 2 more days left of CES. Today and tomorrow I’m looking to hit more of the startup area (Eureka Park) and the main show floor at the Las Vegas convention center. Much more to come!

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

I was recently talking to Paulo Machado about what digital health was happening at the CES conference in Las Vegas (see my full schedule of Health Care IT Conferences and Events). Over the 10 years I’ve been going to the event, digital health has really grown at CES. Plus, it has its own subsection called the Digital Health Summit. I’ll actually be speaking at CES as part of a panel on genomics called “Look Who’s Talking: Newborn Genomic Data Enables Precision Medicine” which is happening January 7th, 2:15 PM – 2:40 PM if you’d like to attend.

As I was talking about digital health at CES, I learned that Paulo is now CEO of an evidence based digital therapy company. I’ve long loved the concept of evidence based digital therapies and I was glad to see someone like Paulo working on them. For those not familiar with digital therapies, here’s a look at the top 3 companies in the space:

Claritas Mindsciences
Claritas MindsSciences designs evidence based digital therapies that empower people to manage their cravings and addictions. Dr. Judson Brewer founded the company when he was leading Yale’s Therapeutic Neuroscience Clinic. Our digital solutions deliver evidence-based mindfulness training in a personalized, cost effective & scalable fashion. Our first product, Craving to Quit is a 21 session smoking cessation program based on an NIH funded randomized controlled clinical trials which showed that our approach was twice as effective as gold standard treatment at the end of therapy and was >5x as effective at week 17 with a quit rate of 31%. Healthy Eating and Opioid/Drug addiction solutions will be launched in 2016.

Omada Health
Omada works with employer and health plan customers to provide scalable, effective, and evidence-based behavioral interventions for those at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic conditions. Combining proven behavioral science and the clinically-meaningful results for a tipping point population – those most at-risk for developing obesity-related chronic diseases. Omada operates on a pay-for-outcomes pricing model that eliminates risk for enterprise customers, and is helping drive the company’s growth in the marketplace.

WellDoc
WellDoc is a digital health technology company that develops mobile solutions to drive behavioral and clinical change in chronic disease. WellDoc’s goal is to improve patient self-management and help physicians overcome gaps in the delivery system to improve clinical outcomes and decrease cost. WellDoc has commercialized the first mobile prescription therapy, BlueStar®, for adults with type 2 diabetes. Mobile prescription therapy fills the support gap between patients and providers during the 8700 hours that individuals are living their lives outside the healthcare system. WellDoc has a proven track record of contributing published, peer-reviewed clinical evidence since 2008 and in June 2015 presented real-world patient engagement and clinical outcomes at the American Diabetes Association’s (ADA) 75th Scientific Session. BlueStar is recognized by the ADA on its website as the first and only in the new class of diabetes treatment known as Mobile Prescription Therapy.

I’m sure there are other companies that are working on digital therapies. Please share them in the comments. It’s time we spend a lot more time learning about these companies since companies like these are going to transform health care as we know it.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

The panel was an interesting discussion, but I think the underlying discussion really centered around how screwed up many parts of healthcare are right now. This showed itself in two different ways. One was that telemedicine could possibly fix some of those screwed up parts of healthcare. Second, telemedicine is actually hard to execute because of some of the screwed up parts of healthcare. It’s kind of odd to look at it that way.

I tweeted a number of the comments that struck me and so I thought I’d share them here for those who weren’t following along on Twitter.

Healthcare has always been about safer and more affordable. The discussion was never convenience. #2013ces#hitsm

Will telemedicine become the “standard of care” so that this becomes a big issue? I hope we don’t reach the point that this is the reason we implement telemedicine, but it might take something like it to get people off the proverbial couch.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

As most of you know, I attend quite a few healthcare IT conferences. This is aided by many great conferences coming to my hometown of Las Vegas. Next week this happens again when the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) happens in Las Vegas. If you thought HIMSS was big, you should attend CES to see what big really is. CES is insane. It’s so large that I think that Las Vegas is the only convention city that can support its size. CES takes over both the Las Vegas Convention Center and the Sands Convention Center and that’s just for the official show.

I’ve been attending CES ever since I moved to Las Vegas about 7 years ago. At first I mostly attended CES to enjoy the “circus.” I’d just walk onto the CES show floor and get lost in the flashing lights, incredible products, showy booths, and just about everything else you could imagine on an exhibit floor. It was always a fun experience and I’d always happen upon something healthcare IT related in my wanderings.

A couple years ago, CES started to create essentially mini-conferences within the larger CES conference. One of those focuses was healthcare IT and was called the Digital Health Summit. Since those small beginnings the digital health portion of CES has grown into a really interesting place to see various consumer health IT products.

The Digital Health Summit is broken into two areas. First, they have the educational programming piece which is 2 days of digital health panels. You can see the full Digital Health Summit agenda here. One thing I love about the Digital Health Summit is that it’s not the regular healthcare IT speakers. In fact, in many cases it is people who you won’t find at other healthcare IT conferences you might attend. So, you’re guaranteed to hear some different perspectives on healthcare IT that you hadn’t heard before. Plus, they bring in big names like Arianna Huffington, Sanjay Gupta, and Deepak Chopra MD.

The second part of the Digital Health Summit is a section of the CES show floor that is focused on digital health. Each year I’ve attended the Digital Health section of CES has grown larger and larger. It’s usually an interesting mix of devices, exercise equipment, healthcare companies (like United Health Group), and other amazing healthcare technology (like the Genetic sequencer at last year’s CES). I even found an EHR company at CES one year. It seems that healthcare devices are really coming into their own this year and so I expect the exhibit hall to be stock full of the latest medical devices.

I’m sure I’ll be tweeting from CES on @ehrandhit when I find cool things. Plus, I’m sure I’ll capture a picture or two of the craziness that is CES (like the guy last year who was doing double back flips on a trampoline wearing skis).

If you’re going to be at CES, let me know. I always love meeting people at the event and enjoying the craziness together.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

While I definitely had quite a bit of excitement over this year’s CES and Digital Health Summit, I have to admit that I ended up leaving CES a bit disappointed. I’m trying to decide if it being the fifth year I’ve attended CES is making me immune to the hype that surrounds the event or if I’ve just been going to too many conferences in general and so I’ve already heard much of the hype. At the end of the day, I describe this year’s CES as incremental versus trans formative.

There were a few exceptions of things that caught my eye while navigating the CES circus that are worth mentioning.

Ion Proton Genetic Sequencer
Probably the most amazing thing I saw for healthcare was the Life Technologies Ion Proton Genetic Sequencer. Plus, I’m not alone with this feeling. Dan Costa of PC Mag called it “The Coolest Thing I Saw at CES 2012.” To be quite frank, it is pretty amazing. It’s part of the amazing movement happening in bringing genomic data to healthcare.

The Ion Proton Genetic Sequencer (they need a better name) is awesome cause you can do a full genome in a day on a machine that costs about the same as an MRI machine. Plus, I personally think they’re just getting started on optimizing the technology. As they continue to improve the technology the cost of the machine and the time and cost to do the analysis will continue to drop. We still don’t know exactly how to use the genomic data in healthcare, but machines like this are going to make it possible for us to find new ways to use this data for good.

I still can’t help but imagine an EHR having all of our genomic data available to it.

Liquipel
Probably the coolest general technology and innovation that I saw at CES was called Liquipel. Liquipel is a technology that makes your device repel water using a nano coating. The best way to understand how it works is to check out some of the Liquipel videos and I’ll embed one below that gives a nice overview.

Of course, they have the disclaimer that it should never be submerged in water, but it was amazing to see it repel the water and still work. Plus, probably the coolest demonstration they did was with a Kleenex. They’d applied the nano-coating to a Kleenex and then they placed it in water. You’d think it would shrivel up and absorb the water. Nothing. I then asked if I could touch the Kleenex to see if I could feel the coating. Nothing. It felt like a Kleenex.

Many health IT people would love this technology. Then, it wouldn’t be such a concern to put your iPad next to the sink in the exam room. I wonder if the nano technology can do anything with infection control with devices. I imagine it doesn’t solve that issue.

I’m sure many are wondering how they can get their device treated with Liquipel. Right now they said you have to drop it by their office in California to get it done over a lunch or something. However, they’re working with phone manufacturers to get their technology in every phone. Pretty amazing stuff.

John Sculley
Another highlight of CES for me was the chance to hear John Sculley talk at the Digital Health Summit. I can’t say he said anything too groundbreaking. Although, he did say that health IT companies should stop focusing their revenue model on corporate health programs. I found that interesting. The most interesting comment came from colleague Dan Munro after John Sculley’s talk. He commented how interesting it was that so many of these older ex-CIO’s of major tech companies are getting into healthcare. I carried the thought through for Dan that as you age, you start to care about healthcare a lot more than you did when you were younger and healthier. I wonder if we’ll see this trend continue as more tech people get older and start to care more about healthcare.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

I’ve seen this coming over the past couple years of attending CES (Consumer Electronics Show). Yes, one of the real advantages I have of living in Las Vegas is all the amazing conferences that I get to attend. CES is one of those conferences. If you thought HIMSS was big (and it is big), CES blows HIMSS out of the water when it comes to size of conference and particularly absolutely insane over the top booths. Imagine a 50+ foot high video wall with hundreds of TVs bigger than you have in your house and at the center the biggest consumer HD TV on the planet.

I’m happy to admit that about half of my attendance is like going to watch the “circus” that is CES. However, last year I was surprised by the healthcare presence at CES (even an EHR vendor was exhibiting). This year it seems that the healthcare IT section of CES will be even bigger and many of my health IT and EMR friends on Twitter are talking about attending CES including Neil Versel who writes on Meaningful Healthcare IT News.

The real key to the healthcare presence at CES has been what I call a “conference within a conference.” In this case the Digital Health Summit takes place as a sub conference to CES. Yes, that includes 2 days of Digital Health speakers and a whole section of the North Hall (right next to all the insane car tech) that’s devoted to Digital Health. I know the people at Zeo have a sleep lab all set up if you get too tired at CES and need a nap. Plus, I think they’ll be live streaming the sleep data online as well.

Assuming I can rip myself away from all the toys and booth babes that are found at CES, I’ll be tweeting and blogging about some of the stuff I see at CES when it comes to healthcare. You can also follow other health people at CES and the Digital Health Summit on Twitter at the hashtag #digitalhealth (If you haven’t figured this out yet, you can click that link and see stuff on Twitter whether you have a Twitter account or not).

If you’re going to be at CES, let me know and maybe we can try and find each other a midst the mayhem. For those not going to CES, hopefully I can provide you some interesting highlights of the event.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

A source just told me that an insurance company that does only professional liability insurance for doctors is providing a 5% discount to all doctors who implement EHR and use it in a meaningful manner.

This is really interesting news for me since I’ve seen a number of really interesting debates about whether use of an EHR would actually raise liability insurance for doctors or lower it. This is the first confirmed company I’ve found that has actually acted on a doctors use of an EMR in their liability insurance premiums (of course, maybe there are more I don’t know about).

Of course, there are a lot of details missing in the statement posted above. For example, how does the liability insurance company plan to measure if the doctor is using an EMR in a “meaningful manner”? Will they discriminate (not in a bad way, but in a good business way) against EMR software which isn’t up to snuff?

Lots of other issues that could be talked about, but I’m heading to the Digital Health Summit at CES. So, this should start a really interesting discussion and I’m sure I’ll do some follow up posts on this subject since I have plenty to say about it.

Also, looks like I’ll have to add liability insurance savings to my list of EMR benefits. I’m thinking it’s about time to do a series of posts on the “EMR Benefits.” One EMR benefit post a day would start a really interesting set of discussions I think.

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